Posted on 08/06/2022 6:45:11 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Reiko Yamada was 11 years old on August 6, 1945, when the US dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Now 88, she is among the few survivors of the horrific attack, which killed around 140,000 people, and is determined to pass on the lessons of history. But Yamada and other survivors fear their voices are not being heard. On the 77th anniversary of the bombing, FRANCE 24 reports on the survivors of the attack.
Bells tolled in Hiroshima on Saturday as the city marked the 77th anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing.
Reiko Yamada was 11 years old on August 6, 1945. Her school was just 2.6 kilometres from the epicentre of the attack.
The young girl saw a plane and a flash, then nothing. A tree fell on her, but she survived and found her family. Today, she is determined to keep the painful memories of that fateful day alive.
(Excerpt) Read more at france24.com ...
That’s OK. I occasionally agree with you! I can’t understand all this commiserating on the behalf of Japan, and the other indifference to the suffering our soldiers, airmen, Marines and sailors would’ve had. Not to mention tens of thousands of POW is getting beheaded by samurai swords because we abandon them. World sure has gotten crazy these days hasn’t it?
I have a picture of the Enola Gay that was taken by my Uncle when he was on Tinnan as a 1st Marine Raider. signed by Tibbets and his navigator VanKirk. Can’t remember how to post.
Thanks. I figured a Freeper would know. This topic comes up every year.
Everything I learned about WWII history reinforces that fact. The atomic bomb was dropped at the same time as the USSR was set to invade the home islands of Japan. The USA dropped the bombs as a warning to the Soviets not to invade.
At the same time, Japanese officials ignored the death tally from the Hiroshima bomb and stated they would continue the war no matter how many bombs were dropped on Japanese cities. Only the threat of falling under Soviet occupation, did they relent in favor of American occupation.
The way it went down…generations will tell of the horrific carnage and will keep them from pulling the same shit as Pearl Harbor again. If we did a lesser punishment they would forget in time and decades later we would have to deal with them again.
Of course…by the time we got to Election Day 2007…we had forgotten 9/11/2001
Same here. My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge and liberated the concentration camps.
He was waiting to get on a ship and head to Japan when the bombs were dropped.
The goal, as it should be, was to save both American and Japanese lives.
The Japanese had already proven their fanatical resolve to fight to the death and to the last man on multiple island encounters. How much more would their resolve be for their Homeland?!
The math here is not hard.
Invade and lose many, MANY more lives, or end the war quickly.
“World sure has gotten crazy these days hasn’t it?”
The world has always been crazy. That’s why it often falls to good people to stand up against the people who celebrate chaos.
Japan was getting ready to slaughter every POW it had, which numbered over 100,000. They wanted to free up the troops guarding them, and they also didn’t want any POW uprisings after the invasion started. This was to start around August 22. So every POW owes their life to the dropping of those two bombs.
For starters, the USSR was only as effective as it was in WWII was Lend-Lease from the other Allied nations. They couldn't even have stopped the Nazis at Stalingrad without it. If the US and the UK stopped supplying them because they were engaging in an invasion of Japan, that invasion would have collapsed.
At war's end the Soviets Pacific fleet was a brown-water-only operation, ZERO blue water naval assets. And the Japanese already had handed their ass to them once in a naval battle earlier in the 20th Century.
So it's not as certain as all that that a Russian invasion even would have reached Japan.
Plus, the Japanese Army still was relatively intact because all the previous land battles had involved primarily naval infantry, not army. They were guarding the homeland and spoiling for a fight.
Plus, as the atomic bombings took place, the Japanese were training children as young as pre-schoolers to be ammunition bearers to help repulse the invasion.
The Japanese clearly were gearing up for a fight to the last man, and I don't think they would have cared whether the star on the invader's caps was silver or red.
The Japanese only stopped fighting because the Emperor took the extraordinary measure of telling them to in a radio address. Absent this, it's virtually certain the military commanders would have ordered their forces to keep fighting and tens of thousands of more Japanese would have died. Hirohito knew this and I think he ordered them to stop fighting out of compassion for his people, not out of fear of the Russians.
The only certainy is that we nuked them and they surrendered. Everything else is hindsight and speculation.
Clearly the U.S. leadership had no reason to be confident that two atomic bombs would be sufficient. As others have pointed out here on this thread, in early 1945 the U.S. had already firebombed TOKYO to ruins — and that didn’t do the trick.
The answer they came up with was clever and worked: let the Americans use the atomic bomb they had developed and then portray themselves as the victim of a terrible, inhumane new weapon. And that is just what they did, thereby managing to keep the Emperor and the Japanese elite in power during the Occupation and afterwards. Notably, neither the Emperor nor the elite ever had to pay reparations, admit war guilt, or disgorge the wealth they had brutally looted from Asia.
The full story was known to the US as a result of comprehensive decrypts of Japan's military and diplomatic codes. Japan had paid the Portuguese to develop a spy operation out of Mexico City against the Manhattan Project. Japan's own nuclear scientists had a pretty good idea of an atomic bomb's destructive force from their own A-bomb work. And the entire blame-the-bomb and the Americans propaganda line was laid out in directions to Japan's diplomatic missions.
So we still get news stories like this every August, Japan refuses to acknowledge that it foolishly and wrongly started the war in the Pacific, and for every Japanese who is called a vicitm of US atomic bombs, there are many hundred more who were victims of Japan's war of conquest in Asia. In the end, Japan got off easy without a proper reckoning of her crimes.
Truman's decision was to not do anything.
FDR ordered the nuking of Japan before he died. Truman didn't even know of the bomb's existence until after he was sworn in. The decision he took was to not interfere with the orders FDR already had given.
So we nuked Japan, not because Truman ordered it, because his signature did not appear on any of the orders. We nuked Japan because Truman elected to do nothing and let FDR's orders be executed as he'd written them.
1. They aren’t white.
2. They weren’t historically Christian.
3. They were no different than many other Asian cultures in their treatment of foreigners and peasants.
And they don’t care about over a million civilians murdered by the J’s in Nanking, Manila, Rangoon, and other places.
By December of '45, the two reactors in Washington were producing enough plutonium for four bombs a month. And the Nagasaki bomb was the last on that was hand-built. The rest were built on an assembly line, so they could assemble them faster than we could make plutonium.
The atomic bombings weres conducted under FDR's orders (without interference from Truman). If Japan had not surrendered after the Fat Man bomb, FDR's instructions were to continue bombing as soon as the bombs were available. Essentially to continue nuking then indefinitely until they cry "Uncle."
And by early 1946 we'd have had the assets to nuke a further four Japanese cities a month.
They were producing a little less than one bomb per month at that time. I believe the third attack was planned for sometime in mid-September. Later on, after the war, plutonium production dropped off due to a reactor problem called the “Wigner effect,” so that one-per-month rate wouldn’t have been sustainable until that issue was solved.
We’re also lucky somebody didn’t bump off Hirohito to make him a “martyr”.
“My only regret is we didn’t give them more of a chance to surrender…first. There was a 3rd option.
1. Do nothing
2. Nuke civilian population centers
——
3: Use 1 or 2 nukes on strictly military targets close to their seat of government. ... would have had a minuscule number of civilian deaths (compared to a big city).
We could always have went back to cities later, except this time with more of a superior moral position.” [Phoenix8, post 17]
Your statements are nonsensical, in light of the verified historical record.
The Allies did give the Japanese more than one opportunity to surrender, before 6 August 1945. They ignored the offers. Not until after the second strike - on Nagasaki - did the Emperor intervene. And the military largely desired to continue fighting: as tlozo noted in post 27, and BiteYourSelf in post 156, a coup by mid-grade Imperial Army officers against his rule came within inches of succeeding.
The US Strategic Bombing Survey determined that by July 1945 there were no “purely military targets,” nor any industrial-production targets located away from civilian population centers. Dispersion of war-materiel production into civilian neighborhoods was far more advanced than in any other nation in history.
To a greater extent than in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan had integrated its non-combatant populace into the plans of the armed forces. Pretty much no civilians left; 11-year-olds like the girl in the France24 story were being trained en masse to assault Allied invasion troops with sharpened bamboo stakes.
Keep in mind these facts; American bombers had already visited more injury on those non-existent “civilian population centers,” hitting over 60 cities, killing many more people from March 1945 through early August 1945, than did the two atomic strikes together.
There weren’t enough atomic bombs in existence to carry out any extended bombardment campaign in the near term. And the bombs themselves were still mostly untested; a true fissile yield did succeed on 16 Jul 1945 but complete weaponization never did succeed until the strike on Hiroshima itself. Crews from 509CG dropped something like nine inert shapes, and not a single proximity fuze functioned.
It’s cute that moralizers wring their hands so many years on, but in the midst of a war such as that still raging in summer 1945, moral navel-gazing would have been a road to failure. In such instances, effectiveness must take priority over morality - especially the overly precious sort indulged in after the fact.
The Japanese political and military structure had to be destroyed. They would have remained a continuous threat otherwise.
If they had not surrendered after Nagasaki, we would have invaded on schedule. As more bombs (maybe a dozen) came online, they would have been employed as tactical nuclear weapons, including on the advance across the Kanto Plain to Tokyo.
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